Analyzing social media ads of small iphone apps that bring in millions in monthly revenue

OCT 2023

In my previous post, I analyzed the reviews of an iphone app to see what I can learn about it and its marketing, without even trying it. One of the common things mentioned in the reviews were the social media ads that brought the user to the app in the first place. I thought it was interesting because it helps explain why this specific app was appearing high in the App Store search results while there are many other very similar apps that barely get any usage. In the post below, I'm going to analyze the social media ads of these apps to see what I can learn about them.

Do social media ads even work?

Besides the obvious benefit of converting some traffic from ads to paying users, there's another benefit for ads, which is that it also helps with the organic placement of the app in the App Store search results. Let's say that a user from the ad didn't end up paying, the app can still get some benefits from acquiring this user:

App Store conversion stats - Even just the fact that the user viewed the app page and then ended up downloading it, signals to Apple that this app converts views to downloads, which affects the algorithm and places the app higher organically.
App Store reviews - It will try to have the user leave a positive review. Reviews have a big influence on organic search results on the App Store, so this will improve organic rankings as well.
App Store retention stats - It will let the user use the app for free with limited functionality. Apple tracks app usage and retention, so increased usage will again influence the algorithm.
Ad revenue - The app lets users unlock paid features without paying, but by watching video ads instead. So even users who don't pay can bring in some revenue for the app.

The app helps Apple by bringing in new traffic to the App Store, and Apple in return places the app higher in the search results. The other apps in this saturated niche, that don't use paid ads, stay lonely at the bottom, even if they are potentially better or cheaper. Most of this applies to any other platform, like the Play Store, Shopify apps, etc since they all have some sort of algorithm to display search results for their users, and they try to optimize it for the most app usage, reviews and revenue.

The social media ads

I looked at many different ads for the niche of phone cleaning apps and noticed a few patterns that I thought are interesting, which I describe below. But on a side note, I thought it's amusing how much effort goes into educating people about how to clear storage on their phone. People from different walks of life, different ages, and in various languages explain the same iPhone popup of running out of storage, and how to deal with it, by using the app they are promoting.

The main challenge of video ads is to grab the user's attention fast and stop them from scrolling, even for a second, to give the video a chance. That's why in all of the ads, the first screen and 2-3 seconds are always dramatic, interesting and fast. Only after a few interesting seconds, the ads start talking about the app and show why it's useful.

Two types of ads

There are two types of ads that I found interesting:

A person presenting - this kind has the benefit of being more relatable, but dependent on the creator and harder to scale.
Without a presenter - this kind is scalable and makes it possible to create and test many variations, but less personal.

Type 1: Ads with a person presenting

Example 1

@kessel_nathan_official is a creator with 10.2M followers who makes tiktok videos unrelated to mobile apps.

The video was posted on his channel so there's the benefit of having his large audience exposed to the ad and will more likely to watch it because they are familiar with him. The video got around 1.2M views.

While many other ads use generic screens and an AI voice, in this ad the creator speaks and shows up in the video which makes it more engaging, but I assume also costs much more.

The first two seconds are grabbing attention:

A human face speaking to the camera, someone who is already proven to be popular on this platform.
Mentions a couple's relationship FAST: "my girlfriend and I".
Gets dramatic fast: "so fed up!"
Uses dramatic zoom effects and is very fast paced. There's nothing related to any app or storage cleaning at all. Everything is about grabbing attention fast.

The following part starts talking about the problem, but still full of pictures of a couple and a funny video of a cat, and is very fast paced. It describes the problem that gets them "super mad" which is... you guessed it! Running out of iPhone storage 🤣.

Only in the last part it talks about the app which is the solution to their problem, and shows how to use the app to solve the storage issue.

A nice touch is that in the video, the viewers are sent to the app store to search for the app and download it. I think that this video runs both as an ad (with a direct link) and also appears on the creators page (as a regular video, without a link). So by sending the viewers to the app store to search, gets some additional traffic for the advertiser when the video doesn't have a direct link. It will also likely to increase the ranking position of the app for this keyword. Although, it is a little risky because they might choose a different app from the results, given there are so many similar apps. I'm not sure that's the case because I'm not very familiar with TikTok so let me know if I got it wrong.

More examples - a person presenting

Example 2 - 4.6M views and 65K likes, by a creator with 65K followers.
Example 3 - 3.8M views and 287K likes, by a creator with 2.8M followers.
Example 4 - 1.1M views and 42K likes, by a creator with 92.3K followers.
Example 5 - 220K views 7.5K likes, by a creator with 1.2M followers.

A few things these ads have in common:

Starts with a human in the frame
A dramatic claim or problem right away, such as "Buying storage for your iPhone is a scam!!"
Fast transitions and a lot of things going on the screen at once
Shows actual screens of the app and the app in use by a real person

Type 2: Ads without a presenter

The second type of ads is without a presenter. These ads usually show hands using an app running on a real physical phone. They can also feature a short part of video of a person pointing to a text or doing something, but not speaking, and can be from a stock footage library. The audio is these ads is either a narration or uses the AI text-to-voice option.

There are many benefits to making ads without a presenter:

you're not dependent on a specific person, so it's easier to make many ad variations
anyone, anywhere can be the "hands" that show something on the phone - which can significantly reduce the cost and make the process more scalable
you can use the AI text-to-voice option (which is very popular anyway and some creators even prefer to use it themselves)
you can experiment with many variations of audio and stock footage

The main disadvantages are that they are less relatable, and there's usually no "plot".

An example of this kind of ads is the following ad that got 40M(!) views and 125K likes, made by a creator with 114K followers, but she doesn't appear in it at all, and uses the AI voice for narration.

Example 1

A few things I found interesting:

The voice used is the AI text-to-voice option, even though it's made by a creator that has many videos of her speaking in them - which shows that this AI voice can be even better sometimes.
The video is essentially just hands showing how she uses the app, but all the photos are of real people, not just photos of nature or nice views.
It starts with the caption and text of "What a fun way to go through your pictures?" which is different from all the other cleaning apps I mentioned before, even though this app still competes for the same traffic of storage cleaners (it's called "Photo Cleaner: Swipewipe").

I like the ui of this app and how it has a creative angle on this whole "phone cleaning" niche. Instead of just making another app that looks exactly like all the other ones, they found a creative way to stand out. The ui of the app seems like it is perfect for a tiktok video: large buttons, colorful, swiping, etc

More examples - Ads without a presenter

Example 2

This video got 677K views and 20.1K likes, made by a creator with 1.7M followers. It also uses the AI voice and shows hands using the app on the phone. But this ad starts with a more generic "Clean up your storage on your iPhone" and then goes to showing the app right away. On the other hand, this video is very similar to the other videos on this channel that 1.7M followers trust and follow, so it probably has trust already established and they might even like this straightforward style.

Example 3 - 78K views and 3.2K likes, by a creator with 25K followers.
Example 4 - 64K views and 4.1K likes, by a creator with 24K followers.
Example 5 - 140K views and 2K likes, by a creator with 1.9K followers.

Example of many variations for the same app

The reason I initially started writing this post is because in my previous post I analyzed the reviews on an iPhone app and many of them mentioned the instagram and social media apps that brought them to the app in the first place. Using Facebook's page transparency features, it's possible to see all of these ads on their Facebook page.

It has a huge variety of ads, both with presenters and without, translated to different languages. Many of these ad variations seem like they were fully automated with AI voices and generic stock videos.

In all of these ads, notice the first two seconds and how they try to capture attention. Sometimes it's a phone being washed with water and soap, sometimes it starts with the problem of "no storage" right away.

Short form videos are effective to promote apps

I was surprised to see how much content and ads there are on tiktok that is related to showcasing or promoting mobile apps and saas products. I'm not using it myself and I always thought it's mostly for dancing videos, but it seems like many app makers are successfully using tiktok for marketing. Have you tried tiktok ads? What do you think about the examples above? Let me know by replying to this tweet.

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